Drivewyze, which helps commercial trucking companies save time by bypassing weigh stations through a mobile app, just raised $7.5 million in a round led by Emergence Capital Partners and iNovia Capital.
They’ll use the capital for a sales and marketing expansion of their bypass service that should bring their offering nationwide by next year. It works through a mobile app that alerts a subscribing trucker when they are about two miles away from an inspection site. It’s currently available in 16 states, but the company is hoping to get to full national coverage in 2014.
The company is a spinout from Intelligent Imaging Systems, a Canadian road technology company that has been around for a decade. They launched Drivewyze as a standalone division last year and starting signing up truck fleets with good historical safety scores. They built a commercial mobile radio service that allows their platform to communicate with inspection sites.
When truckers are about one mile from a Drivewyze-enabled inspection site, the app will let the driver know whether to bypass it or report in for an inspection depending on what the local law enforcement agency says they should do.
Their business model is to charge $7.99 per month for a single state and $12.99 for a multi-state plan.
Emergence Capital, which is an enterprise-focused fund that has backed Salesforce, Yammer and Box, has been looking for software-as-a-service bets that cater to very specific verticals including transportation and health. They have about $575 million under management.